August 13, 2013

Large Lump development is based on the idea of replacement. Piecemeal growth is based on the idea of repair. Since replacement means consumption of resources it is easier to see that piecemeal growth is the sounder of the two from an ecological point of view. But there are even more practical differences. Large lump development is based on the fallacy that it is possible to build perfect buildings. Piecemeal growth is based on the healthier and more realistic view that mistakes are inevitable… Unless money is available for repairing these mistakes, every building once built is condemned to be, to some extent, unworkable…Piecemeal growth is based on the assumption that adaptation between buildings and their users is necessarily a slow and continuous business which cannot, under any circumstances, be achieved in a single leap.

Politicians don’t want to hear this message. They need the large lumps, the overblown ‘regeneration’ projects whose only measure of success is how much money is being spent (often ours) because that way they can retain control. Piecemeal growth depends on lots of individuals and small businesses making their own choices – where would the politician’s corporate paymasters supporters be then?

June 29, 2013

Somehow I have only just come on the work of Albert Jay Knock. I don’t know how I missed him, but I did and I’m now sharing a passage that leapt out at me when I read it this morning in his book 'Our Enemy, the State . Written in about 1934 it seems equally apposite today:

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

See also this from Bertrand Russell, that I originally posted way back in 2007.

June 28, 2013

...there is a profound sense in which authoritarianism (and even totalitarianism) feel right to many people -- "right" in the sense that it is very familiar, that it is the environment in which they were first made to function. So when the State expands its control over us, when the State spies on us, when the State lists more and more activities which are forbidden or for which we must seek "permission" before we act, and even when the State announces that it has a Murder Program, many people, most people, think: "The State knows best. The State has much more information than I do, and our leaders must have reasons for their actions. And certainly, the State only acts to protect us. The State acts for our own good." This is what we had to believe about our parents, regardless of the cruelties to which they subjected us -- and this is what most adults now believe about their political leaders.

June 11, 2013

If there was ever a better indicator of the poverty of thinking of this nasty excuse for a government and of the lies they tell us about localism, it is the fact that they deem it necessary not just to tell thousands of school students that their efforts are a waste of time but that they want to include in the legislation details of precisely how each grade will be designated - numbers not letters, 1 must be the lowest grade, 8 the highest.

May 07, 2013

A recent item on the BBC web site briefly looked at the question of whether start ups could be the answer to Spain’s economic problems. Given that the example they chose was yet another cup cake seller, you could be excused for dismissing this as hyperbolic nonsense. It isn’t though.

Out of curiosity I created a very simple spread sheet model that looked at what might be the position five years after the creation of a notional cohort of new businesses. For simplicity I assumed each of these would be a single person at the outset, but it would not be too difficult to refine things to allow for a range of business sizes from the outset. I found some data which suggested that, in the UK at least, 45% of startups were still trading after five years. That is actually better than I expected, but I took that, and constructed a year on year table of survival rates that led up to that figure. New starts also tend to grow more rapidly so I also created another table of year on year growth rates. I’m looking for some data to make this a bit more robust.

From these two simple tables I set up a spread sheet to see what the situation would be after five years. The proponents of big business, politicians and the apologists for the big state will all use the relatively high failure rates of startups as an argument for putting large amounts of state money into supporting the work of large firms. What I already knew , and which seems to be confirmed by the figures from my simple model is that it isn’t the failure rate that counts, although if that can be reduced it is a bonus. What makes the difference is that because of the higher growth of new starts it doesn’t take long before the employment in surviving businesses more than makes up for the failures. In fact even on quite pessimistic assumptions about growth, the increased employment in surviving businesses almost replaces the failures, while on moderately pessimistic ones after five years there has been no reduction. On the sort of growth historically seen, the employment generated can be quite startling.

If we add to this an assumption of fresh cohorts of new startups in each subsequent year, a not unreasonable assumption even for a small town, then the numbers begin rapidly to accumulate. This isn’t just a model though. The small town of Fairfield in Iowa, popln 9000, managed to create 2000 jobs in 15 years.

The problem is that we tend to look on a new start that doesn’t succeed as a failure, whereas it isn’t, it is an experiment and sometimes experiments give us different answers to the ones we expect. We need to look for ways to avoid the stigma of failure attached to unsuccessful business ventures. Government intervention in support of large scale projects hasn’t exactly got an unblemished reputation either and the money lost in fiascos like De Lorean, or in shoring up the banks vastly outstrips what is lost in small business failures.

If anyone is interested I can send you a copy of the spread sheet to try for yourself. I would love to do an interactive version but don’t have the skills.

April 03, 2013

"Put not your trust in new leaders, better systems, new organisations or regulatory reorganisation," says the Archbishop of Canterbury. "Human fallibility recognised, God's sovereignty trusted; these are also the only stable foundations for human beings in society," he said. "Setting people or institutions up to heights where they cannot but fail is mere cruelty."

Well, he would say that wouldn’t he? But there is a point in there. The 1980s and 90s was a period obsessed with leadership. Probably hundreds of management books purported to describe the essentials of being a great leader. But leadership implies the led. No one seemed to be asking what they want and despite the rhetoric of both Labour and the Coalition governments, they are in practice wedded to a centralised political system in which there are indeed leaders, but the rest have to follow whether they want to or not.

It isn’t about being a leader. It’s about the exercise of power and control.